Mazurka (The Frank Pagan Novels) by Campbell Armstrong

Author:Campbell Armstrong [Armstrong, Campbell]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504007078
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Published: 2015-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Tallinn, Estonia

Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov disembarked from the launch in Tallinn harbour just after daylight and walked until he reached the Mermaid monument, where he sat on an empty bench beside a clump of shrubbery. He pretended to be interested in the monument, gazing up at the winged woman that stood atop a stone structure, but he couldn’t concentrate on it. He read on a plaque that the statue had been erected in memory of the crew of the Russalka, which sank in the Gulf of Finland in 1893, but every so often he’d turn and look away, back across the shore to the harbour, where the tall stacks and funnels of ships looked dense and tangled in the dawn sky.

He was unable to still the nervousness he felt. He got up, walked round the green wooden bench, scanned the shoreline, fidgeted. Since he’d taken the phonecall last night on Saaremaa Island he’d been living as if at some distance from himself. He hadn’t slept. The idea of sleep was foreign to him. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, not even a simple cup of tea. He’d risen in that strangely chill dark just before sunrise and gone down to the fast launch that went back and forth between the island and Tallinn, ferrying mail and supplies, and he’d stepped on board and nobody had asked him any questions even though he’d waited for the captain of the vessel to approach him for ID papers or an official pass. He calculated he could be gone for only six or seven hours before he was missed from the radar base – although in reality his absence might be noticed at any time, especially if there were some unforeseen emergency. But he thought he’d covered himself as well as he possibly could, by informing his adjutant – perhaps the laziest man in the whole command – that he had to travel on unspecified official business to Kuressaare on the southern part of the island.

He stared at the sea, waited, wondered if he’d done the right thing by coming here, or if he’d just walked into a trap that would cost him his life. He could imagine it – discovery, the disgrace of a court-martial, public humiliation, a death sentence. And what would happen to his wife and children then? Branded, destined to a terrible life, a world in which doors would be dosed to them.

Uvarov returned to the bench, sat, waited, smoked a cigarette. The man on the telephone had mentioned Aleksis’s name and the importance of meeting – but he hadn’t identified himself, and now Uvarov, whose heart would not stop kicking against his ribs, wished he’d never met the man known as Aleksis, that he’d never accepted the US passports and the enormous sum of money, but Aleksis had been persuasive, and convincing, and finally impossible to refuse, with his enchanting pictures of life in a free world, a future for the children, a place where a man might advance through his own

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